Abstract
The main aim of our paper is to contribute to the outline of a general inventory of activities in
psychotherapy, as a step towards a description of overall conversational organizations of diff erent
therapeutic approaches. From the perspective of Conversation Analysis, we describe some activities
commonly occurrring in a corpus of sessions conducted by cognitive and relational-systemic
therapists. Two activities appear to be basic: (a) inquiry: therapists elicit information from patients
on their problems and circumstances; (b) reworking: therapists say something designed as
an elaboration of what patients have previously said, or as something that can be grounded on it;
and patients are induced to confi rm/disprove and contribute to the elaboration. Furthermore, we
describe other activities, which turn out to be auxiliary to the basic ones: storytelling, procedural
arrangement, recalling, noticing, teaching. We fi nally show some ways in which these activities
can be integrated through conversational interaction.
